From Tory plans for com­mu­ni­ties to cre­ate their own schools to Guardian hacks beg­ging for alter­na­tive cur­ren­cies, ex-Soviet strate­gies for social col­lapse to alarmist talk of counter-insurgency on Amer­i­can soil, there has been a lot of talk lately about the advan­tages of small, self-sufficient com­mu­ni­ties over the sin­gle one-size-fits-all approach of the nation state. Half the world seems to think that, due to the eco­nomic down­turn or by delib­er­ate pol­icy deci­sion, the gov­ern­ments of the world won’t be effec­tive at rul­ing their nations anymore.

In the lat­ter three cases, it reeks of scare­mon­ger­ing — “The End is Nigh, pre­pare while you still can!” But this kind of idea is infec­tious. There’s a secret thrill in imag­in­ing the down­fall of soci­ety, and some­how a rose-tinted aura of romance around the idea of self-sufficiency. There’s some­thing that feels good and hon­est about being part of a small com­mu­nity rather than just one cit­i­zen out of 60 million.

But there’s a rea­son why, over the cen­turies, fief­doms and tribal ter­ri­to­ries merged together into the nations we have today. Being a small, self-sufficient com­mu­nity is really hard and you don’t want to do it.

What­ever scale of small com­mu­nity you pick, there are problems.

With a vil­lage, maybe you can be self-sufficient on food pro­vided you have enough arable land and peo­ple to farm it. But you’ll all be get­ting by at the sub­sis­tence level, your qual­ity of life will be poor.

With a group of vil­lages work­ing together, you can grow more things, your diet gets bet­ter and you get more resis­tant to crop short­ages and dis­ease. But that’s the kind of issues we’re still talk­ing about. Eco­nomic doom­say­ers who sug­gest that this is the kind of com­mu­nity we should be work­ing towards are sug­gest­ing we revert our mas­sively suc­cess­ful first-world coun­try to third-world near-poverty.

With towns work­ing together, finally we see infra­struc­ture, health­care, edu­ca­tion. But we still can’t afford to defend our­selves. Effec­tive police forces and mil­i­taries, and with them the public’s con­fi­dence that they can go about their daily busi­ness with lit­tle risk of assault or inva­sion, only really become pos­si­ble at the level of the nations we live in today.

Split­ting up into self-sufficient com­mu­ni­ties becomes even more dif­fi­cult because the infra­struc­ture we’ve built up over thou­sands of years of being a coun­try doesn’t lend itself well to being split up again. Case in point: I live in a conur­ba­tion, a fusion of three towns that’s home to around 400,000 peo­ple. How much farm­land do we have within the bound­aries of this conur­ba­tion? Oh, none. How would we feed that many peo­ple? Well, we’d have to absorb the rest of Dorset (pop­u­la­tion 700,000) into our com­mu­nity. Sud­denly it’s not small and roman­tic any­more. We might as well call it Wes­sex and find some­one called Alfred to be king of it for about 5 years until Athel­stan 2 turns up.

To top it all, we our­selves have, through thou­sands of years of mov­ing away from this lifestyle, become incom­pat­i­ble with subsistence-level com­mu­ni­ties. They’re not going to have a lot of demand for autonomous vehi­cles, or for war­ship com­bat sys­tem design­ers, or even (god for­bid) blog­gers. What if — and I know this is going to come as a shock — the hair­dressers and man­age­ment con­sul­tants and adver­tis­ing exec­u­tives that live on my street turn out to not be very good at farm­ing?

No, it’s not going to work. Nations are what we have, and nations are what we have to stick with for the fore­see­able future. If the econopoca­lypse brings down gov­ern­ments, makes them inef­fi­cient, so be it. What we have to do, and luck­ily what hap­pens nat­u­rally, is try our best to fix them.

As a coun­try and a col­lec­tive body of peo­ple, all we ever do is the bare min­i­mum to ensure that life car­ries on as nor­mal. And for once, that’s not a bad thing. When our soci­ety breaks in lit­tle ways, we need to find lit­tle ways of patch­ing it up. If the Tories’ “free schools” work, then great — it’s a lit­tle patch to a prob­lem which is tiny, if it exists at all.

But politi­cians telling us that “Britain is bro­ken!” and blog­gers telling us to pre­pare for a life of sub­sis­tence farm­ing just aren’t helpful.